This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention disclosed below. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived, implemented or described. Therefore, unless otherwise explicitly indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section. Abbreviations that may be found in the specification and/or the drawing figures are defined below, after the main part of the detailed description section.
As a UE traverses cellular networks, the UE interacts with many different RANs. The UE could interact with RANs from different operators, for instance, and/or with RANs having different bearers or air interfaces, and/or with RANs from different cells (e.g., large cells commonly called macro cells, or small cells). These different RANs can be thought of as different “logical instantiations” of mobile networks, which can be supported over a fully or partially shared (e.g., by different operators) infrastructure. These logical instances (often denoted as herein as “network slices” or simply “slices”) can be tailored for different use cases and services, depending on the customers' requirements.
In general, a mobile network may have to support very different use cases which vary in their required connectivity (or coverage), robustness (or frame errors), throughput, latency, mobility pattern, and/or number of connected devices. Each use case may require different technologies in order to satisfy the demands of one or multiple UEs.
Current approaches for RAN sharing (e.g., multi-operator RAN, MORAN) exhibit limited flexibility, scaling, and customization characteristics and therefore do not enable operation of multiple logical mobile networks (each addressing a particular use case) in the RAN domain.